TRASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

1. The Spawn of Abe (2008)
   Max Christie /Clarinet, Mark Rogers/Oboe, MC Maguire /CPU 28:11
2. Narcissus auf Bali (2007)
   Trevor Tureski/Vibes Ryan Scott/Marimba , MC Maguire /CPU 39:53

February 2010 - Naxosblog / USA

In an ongoing series of conversations with artists and composers I present a short YET eye-opening discussion with Innova recordign artist MC Maguire.

Who r u?
There's no delicate way to put this -I am an ex-con. But I'm determined it won’t impede my mercurial rise into the heady, glamorous world of international composition. I've paid my debt to society--if anything they owe me!!! Soon after my internment, I got mix up in the seedier side of music academia (I’m not sure when the punishment ended and the pedagogy began). It’s all a big hurtful, medicated blur--but from pain comes Art, right? Also I vaguely remember a glimpse of an impaled piano teacher, some fire in the trash in the theory dept. and blood coming from my dogs’ ears.

How did these works come about?
The two double concertos on the disk are the rewritten remixes of works conceived in the 90s, when my quill was afire and computers had the power of my current cell phone. One of the bitter ironies of life, is just as technology is allowing my 400 track albatrosi to come to true fruition, regular coinage from musics’ infrastructure is shriveling, and some punk is illegally downloading a two second snippet of my masterpiece for a ringtone (that very kid is dead as we speak!!). The virtuosic bros who r playing on these pieces, live in the hood, have my back, even though I now or at one time owed them money, or have had at least one absinthe-induced altercation.

What inspires you and your work?
Theology, meta-physics, architecture, visual arts,my soiled, overused bios of Bismarck, Cromwell, Custer and Napoleon (St. Helena reflections), and the great carnivorous Pac-man of pop culture, infomercials, no limit holdem poker, mixed martial arts, as well as the numbing spewing forth of ghetto flora and fauna. For me, most music has become white noise--except for maybe the first movement of Mahler’s’ 9th (which I’ve made a career of subconsciously stealing/rewriting) which synchronistically is now playing iPod wallpaper for my weary Oblomov, remote mit hand-tremor, languishing on the chaise-lounge persona.

What are your musical “guilty pleasures”?
What immediately springs to mind is Wagner, as his aging prowess sputtered, he would drape himself in fine silk and frilly lingerie, and dowse himself in expensive ladies’ perfume-- but this is clearly not the question. Suffice to say, I feel guilty saying publically ‘I am composer’--but its’ combined pretentiousness and anachronistic irrelevance brings me secret, impish pleasure.

What did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be someone famous, who, when sashaying jauntily on the promenade with a coquettish female visage on my arm, or pontificating in my box at the theatre with societies’ crème of culture and learning--people might say in passing” now he clearly has the bull by the tail” or “there is a curtain je ne sais quoi about that fellow”, without knowing the actual meaning of the phrase.

What question have you always wanted to answer in an interview? What is the answer to that question?
My greatest musical influence: As an impoverished, food-stamped child growing up in a drafty log cabin, marooned in the Canadian north, my family lived on deer testicles, discolor snow, occasional poking blades of grass and an inhabitable tundra stew (my moms’ specialty). During meals, we sat fearfully mute at a twisted old table while my quasi-deaf father (who had severe undiagnosed ADD) would just keep manually rotating the four available, blaring TV channels, fragmenting any clear narrative arch into an incomprehensible blur. Not only was a loud, circular, rondo-like form chiseled into my cortex (the TV was a radioactive inch from my face) but my fathers’ endless commentaries, diatribes, and inane deconstructionism pointed my impressionable misquideness in a misshapened, multilayered, maximalist, quixotic, economic dead-end direction. He was clearly the first pre-post-modernist, for that I am simultaneously extremely bitter and resignedly grateful.

February 2010 - Fanfare Magazine / USA

There’s interesting stuff going on north of the border, especially when it comes to music which “mashes up” previous music to make new work. John Oswald got into serious trouble with his “Plunderphonics” some years back because he had the chutzpah to use Michael Jackson samples (and images), which aroused corporate fear and ire (and unleashed the lawyers). MC Maguire is probably smarter, in that he uses a huge range of samples blended in such a way as to create a fluctuating wall of sound where nothing is specifically identifiable. This is a report from the front of cutting-edge experiment. These two works (dating from 2008 and 1997, respectively) are each immense, rather like weather systems passing through, dumping rain and snow, with patches of sunlight, before they’ve run their course. They appear to have gone through different mutations before reaching this incarnation, where live instruments have been added to each to provide a sort of acoustic/real-time commentary. ( Nota bene : “cpu” is central processing unit, aka a computer, for those who may be scratching their heads.)This music will certainly not be for everyone. It revels in a sort of “info-overload” that, while representative of our era, goes against our usual ideals of concentrated, active listening. I think that for the 30- and 40-minute durations of each, one can go deep into the moment, but one will also have to withdraw in order to maintain a certain sanity. And that fluctuation in listening I think is natural to this music. …. Maguire seems to be rather listening to the world around him and just transcribing its multiplicity, even chaos. (Reading his notes, one discovers there’s a lot of architectural planning involved in what at first seems a completely capricious flow of sounds.)For some, this won’t be classical music, maybe not even music. (Based on the cover alone, they might avoid the disc, as it looks like a release from some sort of death-metal band.) In the end, for me that’s not a useful question. Yes, it probably goes on too long, and I don’t feel the relentless acoustic parts always contribute as much as the composer obviously thinks they do. In fact, I may not even like this music, but that also seems not very relevant to the experience. Rather, this feels like something very engaged with our time that teaches us something about ourselves and our culture. It’s fascinating, though perhaps a little like the way a car wreck beckons us to rubberneck. So I do recommend it, as an original, even disturbing, but creatively challenging experience for any listener. Robert Carl

February 2010 - Arcane Candy / USA

MC Maguire is a composer who has been working since the 1970s. His works fuse elements of modern classical and pop culture. Trash of Civilizations presents two long-form pieces for live instruments and recorded sounds. The nearly half-hour opener, “The Spawn of Abe,” features a Klezmer clarinet and an Arabic oboe prominently snaking through layers of rhythmic synth and sampled chaos. A thick soup full of singing and talking heads, cawing birds, machine guns, helicopters and the like are frequently punctured with shards of shattering glass. Although the liner notes don’t list drums as an instrument, I can swear I hear some buried deep in the mix. The 40-minute “Narcissus of Bali” replaces the woodwinds with percussion in the form of vibes, marimba and sampled gamelan. This piece pits nature’s sublime harmony against urban industrial noise, and East vs. West as it visits more placid Oriental areas with somewhat homely melodies, and occasionally explodes with sudden complex, cartoon rhythms and big synth riffs that challenge Godzilla to a duel. Near the end, the piece gets really mellow and sparse, then, just when you think it’s going to fizzle away, it builds up to a super-intense, dense frenzy with an abrupt ending, leaving nothing but the world’s longest reverb tail. This music, which sounds like a blend of Iannis Xenakis, Biota and The Beatles “Revolution 9” on steroids, should go over big with any and all ADD victims in your household. I wonder what those folks who rioted at the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring would make of Trash of Civilizations? Would they be just as shocked at the fact that the cover art bears an uncanny resemblance to AMM’s From a Strange Place after a nuclear meltdown? We may never know the answers to these questions! In any case, new music just got newer.

February 2010 - Chicago Timeout / USA

MC Maguire’s moniker sounds like that of a rapper, and there is indeed a sampler’s mind-set at work in the Canadian postmodernist’s brainy mishmashes. The composer’s mission statement, per his website, is to save art from extinction via “reevaluation of high-art aesthetics in the light of popular culture’s ubiquitous, formulaic infectiousness.” The tone of the opening track on MC Maguire’s latest, Trash of Civilizations, mirrors Girl Talk’s ADHD cutting-and-pasting but replaces the whimsy with kaffiyeh-wearing grad-student pretension and moody video-game scores. The premise of “Spawn of Abe” unquestionably compels: A klezmer clarinet and a mizmar-like oboe traverse a soundscape of dusty Cairo streets, crowded Tel Aviv bars and chaotic battle scenes (all field recordings here). But early-’90s synth work renders several segments near-comic. Incantations of mullahs simply lose their potency when interlaced with electronica more appropriate on an Enigma album. A bin Laden vocal clip isn’t enough to lift this otherwise thoughtful exploration of Middle East hostilities out of the heavy-handed and into the profound. Maguire is not to be dismissed, however. If “Abe” plays like a shroom-induced nightmare trek through the streets of Bethlehem, the album’s second and final track, “Narcissus auf Bali,” retains the composer’s maximalist approach while remaining far more structurally coherent. Japanese pop lines feud with Balinese monkey vocalizations in this epic battle, which eloquently integrates solo vibraphone and marimba into a turbulent mix of East and West.

January 2010 - Itunes / USA

MC Maguire=Genius!

“It is obvious from first to last that Maguire is a genius. His music is less working out of base materials than full frontal rhythmic and lyrical assault. He means to take over your sonic universe lock stock and space station, and succeeds. He holds you, captivated by his rolling rhythmic musings through one cultural reference after another, a klezmer band at a Chivas-soaked wedding, crisp radio static that leaves you wanting MORE crisp radio static! until your own sense of truth and aesthetics is formed into his. When his voice is heard at the end of the piece, playing lead character in a series of serial situations, a camping trip gone awry, a summer Barbeque gone sinister, we think more of a soul being cast into the fiery flames of hell having penned an unforgiveable series of sinful orgiastic montages. Hail to Maguire, King of all bombasts, slave to NONE!”

January 2010 - www.ilxor.com / Quebec

2009 Demanding Music Top 30

20.	Led Bib Sensible Shoes Cuneiform
21.	Rothkamm ALT Baskaru
22.	Rodéoscopique Rodéoscopique Audiogram
23.	Mirthkon Vehicle AltrOck
24.	Rupp, Olaf - Marino Pliakas - Michael Wertmüller Too Much is Not Enough FMP
25.	Pateras, Anthony - Robin Fox End of Daze Editions Mego
26.	Jones Trio, Darius Man’ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing) AUM Fidelity
27.	MC Maguire Trash of Civilizations Innova Recordings
28.	Agnel, Sophie Capsizing Moments Emanem
29.	Mezei Wind Quartet, Szilárd We Were Watching the Rain Leo Records
30.	Martin, Aaron Chautauqua Preservation

January 2010 - Kaleidoscope / Sweden

With the hyperkinetic MC Maguire, we hear a work from 2007,"Narcissus auf Bali" for vibraphone, marimba and computer. "Narcissus auf Bali" is a kind of twist on the Greek myth of "Adriadne auf Naxos," but in MC Maguire has transformed the story of Narcissus who feverishly looking for the beautiful Echo in the Balinese jungle.

December 2009 - Zookeeper online / USA

Genre jumping world shattering mind-bending sonic orgy. Jesus Christ, what a mess. I haven’t heard this many styles thrown together in one song since Secret Chiefs 3: middle eastern, African tribal, 80s hair metal, daft punk, insanely epic Hollywood soundtracks...and that’s just the first 6 minutes. Technically these are two modern classical pieces for clarinet/oboe (track 1) and vibraphone/marimba (track 2), but MC Maguire steals the show on the CPU, sampling and synthesizing his heart away and dropping a gazillion bombs on you fools. You don’t have to play the tracks in their entirety ( you might lose a few years of life if you do) but you are required by law to play at least bits and pieces. Indescribably awesome stuff. FCC clean.

1. (28:11) Completely off the wall psycho epic soundtrack modern orchestra. If you’re not sold by the first few bars, skip forward to about 2:10 to where the drums start galloping in and heaven comes down to rock out on earth. Time signatures change abruptly and without warning, and the sound palette reaches everywhere. Probably a thousand individual climaxes are hit in a half hour.
   
2. (39:53) Softer than the previous. A sort of underwater marimba dream where little marimba man is playing his little marimba...until he hits the wrong key and the entire universe explodes into a dynamic rumbling bliss fest where Navajo Indians battle Zeus and Achilles for global supremacy. And you haven’t heard epic until you’ve made it pat the 30 minute mark... Absolutely nuts.

December 2009 - Les Cowboys Fringants / Quebec

Best Albums 2009

01	To Live & Shave in LA: The delectable poisons
02	To Live & Shave in LA: Each day vomits its tomorrow
03	Hecker: Acid in the Style of David Tudor
04	MC Maguire: Trash of Civilizations
05	Bill Orcutt: A new way to pay old debts
06	Secret Chiefs 3: Traditionalists - The Mani Destre Recis Degli Ultimi Uomini
07	"Blue" Gene Tyranny: The Somewhere Songs / The Invention of Memory
08	Krallice: Dimensional Bleedthrough
09	Idea Fire Company: Beauty School
10	JG Thirlwell: The Venture Bros.

October 2009 - Last.fm / USA

Trash of Civilizations is pretty ace.

October 2009 - Cyclic Defrost / Australia

In electronic music minimalist restraint and orderliness reigns supreme, even noise artists tend to favour clean, streamlined routes, so maximalist music of the kind MC Maguire makes is rare.. You could argue that such a hodge-podge resembles the melting pot of the 21st century world city… ..one comes away with the feeling after hours of TV channel-surfing. The two long pieces of ‘Trash of Civilisations’ offer contemporary takes on the concept of the double concerto: ‘The Spawn of Abe’ for Bflat clarinet and oboe (played by Max Christie and Mark Rogers respectively), ‘Narcissus auf Bali’ for vibraphone and marimba (Trevor Tureski and Ryan Scott), with Maguire doing the orchestra on ‘CPU’. It’s fitting that he lists CPU, as it’s Central Processing Unit, and not customary ‘laptop’, that Maguire plays: it’s stuffed to bursting with samples and effects, piled on until it resembles a smeared, fizzing digital wash. Maguire sets up interesting dialogues for these trios to operate: ‘The Spawn of Abe’ sets to work on East-West cliches, and the woodwinds do a wondrous battle. ‘Narcissus auf Bali’ is initially more approachable, Tureski and Scott’s percussion recalling post-Reichians Tortoise in good moments,

September 2009 - The Silent Ballet / USA

7/10 “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” That’s the reaction Chicken Little would have upon hearing this disc. Others might exclaim, “Yikes!” or “Holy shit!” or “Oh no, the apocalypse!” And, in fact, this disc does sound like the end of the world: dense, loud, and unrelenting. These compositions pile sound upon sound, whether it be a spoken sample, folk riff, guitar feedback, explosion, or orchestral bombast, until the sources sardine each other like rush hour commuters. Some refer to this ambitious art as sound collage, but this phrase implies a minimum of overlapping edges. Instead, MC Maguire's Trash of Civilizations is more like a jumble, a repainted canvas with peeling layers, a wreck of girders and plastique. Listening is more than cinematic; it’s sensory overload, an embarrassment of sonic riches shoehorned into a mere hour of music. Windows shatter, pool balls are broken, Godzilla roars: it’s all here. This is probably not a good album to listen to on LSD, but it offers the same hallucinatory disorientation.

Why would you want this? Why would you want bombs and machine gun fire and minarets and choruses of crying babies? Why would you want crashing drums and chanting worshippers and improvised violin and vocoders? Some, admittedly, might not. The two tracks here are intensely musical, but follow no set pattern, offer no discernible beginning or end, pause not a second for reflection. As soon as one catches a snatch of melody adrift in the miasma and starts bobbing the head in empathetic recognition, the moment is over, interrupted, jarringly fused to the next. Whenever the pulse begins to pound in recognition of a pattern or overall scheme, the samples shift, or topple into live playing, and the blueprint is lost. The effect is like that of garbage pail punch (a popular fraternity drink in which every alcohol imaginable is poured into a trash can and masked with Kool-Aid) – you don’t know what’s in it, but it packs a wallop.

So what exactly is going on here? The first track, “Spawn of Abe,” pre-enacts a religious culture clash in which the world’s top three monotheistic faiths, each of which traces its roots back to braham, go at it with each other. We get calls to Islamic prayer, Jewish folk tunes, and snippets of Christian hymn, overlaid by orchestral lashes, angry guitar feedback, military drills, and an overall sense of cacophony. The half-hour track begins and ends at full throttle, with no letup in between; it’s a loud sandwich, with loud toppings, and it’s breathtaking. There’s no way to discern the intent of the composer, but one can easily speculate. Perhaps “Spawn of Abe” is meant to be satiric, mocking claims of exclusivity, or perhaps it is simply the musical equivalent of a little boy gleefully smashing all of his trucks together.

“Narcissus auf Bali” is a Balinese retelling of the story of Narcissus and Echo. The vibraphone takes center stage, while orchestral noises meander behind. Because this track features a primary instrument, the track seems at first to be more formulaic, but after ten minutes, a spoken sample changes the proceedings. We plummet into a world of birds and bongos, bazaar samples, ethnic singing and then, without warning, crunches, crashes, and cavings-in. When the vibraphone returns, its once-soothing sound turns suspect; we’ve been lulled before, but next time will not be as easily fooled. And so, we try not to be taken aback when we hear laser rays. At this point, why not?. The story of a god drowning because he is enamored with his own reflection carries much less weight than that of an apocalyptic vision, until the very end, laden with circus sounds, and fire, and screaming, and death.

One cannot help but admire the chutzpa required to carry such a project to fruition.

September 2009 - National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences / USA

‘Trash of Civilizations’ 52nd Grammy award nomination in categories #103 –Best Small Ensemble Performance/Classical and #97—Best Album/Classical

September 2009 - His Voice / Czech Republic

The CD perfectly reflects the postmodern approach in which he mixes ethnic music, jazz, electronic, pop, and contemporary classical music. The result is sophisticated...

September 2009 - Battery Opera / Canada

MC Maguire's insane and irritating work for Lee Su-Feh's Gecko Eats Fly (which won that French award for choreography in 1998) has resurfaced as Maguire's ‘Narcissus Auf Bali ‘on Innova Records. It still makes Su-Feh crazy, but I love it. Check it out. He's a Genius.

September 2009 - SquidCo /USA

Electroacoustic genre-clashing romps through a universe of sound blending live and organized sources from composer Maguire, works that have to be heard to be believed.

September 2009 - All Music.com / USA

...MC Maguire is basically a sampler artist who, somehow, managed to infiltrate the ranks of academic composers. Unlike what experimental electronica artists would come up with in such a set-up, Maguire churns out actual contemporary music, despite the fact that it is mostly made of urban, nature, and mediaborne sounds, layers upon layers of bits of noise. It's an exciting feat --for acoustic instruments and computer, the latter assuming the role (but not the sound palette) of a symphony orchestra. When the computer gets the spotlight, you tend to process its maximalist output as sound art or collage art, but when the instruments are present, both their parts and the computer's have a distinct "contemporary classical" quality. "The Spawn of Abe is a an epic clash, replete with traditional music quotes in the instrumental parts, war-mongering samples, and large-scale confrontation. It is an exhilarating piece, reminiscent in part of the duo FURTS sample battles, framed in a "New Complexity" context. "Narcissus auf Bali" has a new sonic escalation at every turn. …very dense, hyperactive, demanding music.

August 2009 - babysue.com / USA

Top Pick! This is an interesting album that doesn't sound like all the rest…. the CD described the music as ethno/prog-alt rock/jazz electronica"...and that is probably the best descriptive word string for this music. ….these pieces feature plenty of spontaneous improvisation...sorta like a cross between modern classical and modern jazz. All kinds of trippy sounds and voices bleed in and out of the mix...making for some rather strange and unpredictable listening. The second track is a truly wild ride indeed. Definitely an audio collage strange stuff...esoteric and strangely...hypnotic. We love it. Highly recommended. (Rating: 5+++)

August 2009 - monsieurdelire.com / Canada

….a plethora of sound samples, a well-controlled chaos, an overdose of information that will require several listens in order to peel the many layers of sounds and meanings. This CD is stunning and loaded.

July 2009 - twitter.com/solomn_bill / USA

--listening : MC Maguire, Narcissus auf Bali! 40 mins! AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME!

July 2009 - innovarecordings / USA

Revolution 9.1 Two phantasmagoric whirlwinds take over your CPU for a while and leave you captivated, dazed and grateful too.

META-CONSPIRACY

1. A Short History Of Lounge (2006)
   David Swan/Piano, MC Maguire /CPU (24:24)
2. Got that Crazy, Latin / Metal Feelin' (2006)
   John Gzowski/ Electric Guitar, MC Maguire/ CPU (28:16)

March 2009 - Phrygien Music Blog

...it is an astonishing, mind-blowing work. It brushes away the dust from all classical music,

March 2009 - July 2008 - X-Ray Barbeque Blog

If you like maximalist, layered type of dense composition, I've got another name for you (and it's another Canadian): MC Maguire. Check out his disc Meta-Conspiracy. It's on Tzadik, but don't let that scare you off... for once the obi hype is justified!

June 2008 - All Music Guide.com

Lively, Aggressive, Passionate, Ambitious, Searching, Dramatic, Theatrical, Eccentric, Uncompromising, Elaborate, Literate

MC Maguire has been commissioned by dance companies to compose music, and in the case of Meta-Conspiracy, it could have easily been done for experimental films. What he creates on this daring recording can easily be pegged 21st century contemporary electronic music, but it is so much more than that. Moreover, Maguire's concept is to toss all elements in a blender set on high speed, and listen to the different styles and genres playfully bounce off each other knowing they will not necessarily mix or match and turn into brown goop.

The music, which at times incorporates up to 400 separate tracks from a CPU through layering, sonic sampling and the usage of live improvising instrumentalists, is a fascinating study on how to make new music through digital techniques, written scores and the wide world of sound. Two nearly half-hour compositions are included, and the dizzying heights the music achieves is astounding by any criteria. "A Short History Of Lounge" -- not all that short -- explores a legitimate jazz stance glued to a faux-concerto/quasi-rondo, taking normal circumstance and day-to-day living, stacking it on high in mass plus-plus-plus algebraic run-on sentences, and using pianist David Swan as the control factor. A spoken word warning and industrial sounds inform the pianist's role as an informant, not a prevaricator.

The music is dense and requires close listening as you hear this epic of variations and ethnomusicology in super high definition, drama and duress. A blues harmonica, symphonic notions, a vocal chorus, and a calmed piano repast enter the fray briefly. It's like Frederic Rzewski meets Steve Reich meets The Residents on acid playing laptops. The concept is loosely based on "A Brief History Of The Universe." The second piece "Got That Crazy Latin/Metal Feeling" is based on a 49 chord harmonic progression that moves backward, then forward, although it is not that readily discernable. Mathematics, Brazilian pop, perhaps Captain Beefheart's jazzier side, Claude Debussy, and the influence of Euro-electro pioneer Michael Schenker of The Scorpions and UFO are acknowledged. The dynamic range goes up and down with death rock and metal sounds of electric guitarist John Gzowski as the focal point. The music, as peculiar as it might seem, is never crowded or constipated. At times symphonic, manic and accented by a trio of vocalists including Maguire, whether noodling, rigid or plain ridiculous, the music has a certain warm substance within its obvious schizophrenia. The medication has been taken, it is absorbed and efficient, yet there's an underlying turbulence that cannot be denied. This is a wonderful project, hopefully spawning other similar efforts, and marks Maguire as a unique figure in any genre of contemporary modern music you choose.

December 2007 - LOW MP3 DOWNLOAD.com

Meta Conspiracy is the most important Avant Garde Release of 2007-everyone must hear it!

December 2007 - Apple Itunes .com

Phenomenal. Nothing else like it.****A constantly morphing collage of, well everything. If this doesn't help you make sense of the modern world, nothing will.

December 2007 - http://syro0.twoday.net / Germany

BEST OF 2007, Top 10

10.	Radiohead: In Rainbows
9.	Natasha Bedingfield: N. B.
8.	Feist: The Reminder
7.	Patti Smith: Twelve
6.	BjÕrk: Volta
5.	M.C. Maguire: Meta-Conspiracy two totally crazy compositions with dozens of tracks for CPU accompanied by live instruments piano and electric guitar
4.	Rene Jacobs: Don Giovanni
3.	Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson sings Peter Lieberson: Neruda Songs
2.	Lucinda Williams
1.	Lil Wayne

December 2007 - http://www.cowboysfringants.com / France

Top Ten 2007

1.	To Live and Shave in L.A.: Les Tricoteuses
2.	Nondor Nevaï «DMT Rok» exécuté par _ ("Undrskor")
3.	The Flying Luttenbachers: Incarcerated by Abstraction
4.	Nondor Nevaï: Wooden Machine Music/2001
5.	Foetus: Vein
6.	Haswell/Hecker: Blackest Ever Black
7.	Ergo Phizmiz: Nose points in different directions
8.	RLW avec rm74: Pirouetten
9.	M.C. Maguire: Meta-Conspiracy
10.	To Live and Shave in L.A. 2: The 300 Dollar Silk Shirt

December 2007 - http://www.argumentmachine.com / USA

DJ Clems top 10 2007

10.	Sleeytime Gorilla In Glorious Times
9.	Nels Clines Singers Draw Breath
8.	MIA Kala:
7.	People Misbegotten Man
6.	Blotted Science The Machinations of Dimentia
5.	. Pamella Kurstin Thinking out loud
4.	Keith Rowe The Room
3.	Behold ...the Arctopus! Skullgrid:
2.	Nels Vline and Elliott Sharp Duo Milano
1.	Hans Fjellestad Snails R Sexy

MC Maguire Meta-Conspiracy:
This CD satisfies mine craving for information overload. Two long concertos--one for electric guitar, one for piano--that replace the backing 'orchestra' with densely layered samples. Think 'Plunderphonics' ramped up to the nth degree, then add virtuosic notated scores for guitar and piano. Unlike Plunderphonics, Maguire warps the sampled material to the unrecognizable point, stretching pitches and shifting tempi until a wash of semi-discernable sound is created, enveloping (and sometimes obscuring) the solo passages. At the end of Maguire's pieces, thine brain just kind of...hums. DO WANT.

December 2007 - Circuit Music Magazine / France / Quebec

...in the case of M.C. Maguire, we can bluntly speak about violence, violence like 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'...the composer explains his music as a quirky synthesis of musical styles---what he does not say is they all play simultaneously!! ...combining the energy of rock with the sound textures of Xenakis. However if the first listening might trigger a headache, the subsequent one allows us to pass through the fog covering the music. The piano brightens. We cross a symphony orchestra to what seems like some Bruckner fragment. After a while we can distinguish the mind-blowing design of the structure assembled from the multitude of tracks where diverse electronic sounds/samples are woven. Finally, the sensation of listening simultaneously to 12 radio stations diminishes and allows the courageous listener to appreciate the composer's multi-layered vision.

September 2007 - Exclaim Magazine / Canada

It begins as an accelerating, percussion-happy absorption of musical themes, both naturalistic and digitised, heroically accompanied by Swan's piano. The piece slows to regroup in several spots over its duration before swelling again into massed but always musical layers, not unlike a thick sandwich of Zappa's mid-'80s Synclavier experiments ..it somewhat resembles a more frenetic, serial version of label boss John Zorn's Naked City band pieces. That is good fun for those who like music that resembles rollercoasters...

September 2007 - Whole Note Magazine / Canada

Editor's Choice ---The music of Toronto based composer MC Maguire, on his disc 'Meta-Conspiracy' starts with full throttle and almost never lets up. There are brief moments of respite, but the overall impression is one of manic activity. After a cryptic warning on the computer voice of a Mac error message about an overload of midi information, we are off and running full speed ahead. A Short History of Lounge is a 25 minute quasi-concerto in which local piano wizard David Swan is pitted against a computer which provides a virtual orchestra of synthetic sounds and samples. Rumba rhythms, pop and classical quotations layered upon layer which ritard and accelerate until a final tempo of a quarter note =900(!) is achieved. Got that Crazy, Latin/Metal Feelin' provides electric guitatist John Gzowski with a similar backdrop, a "wall of sound" such as Phil Spector could only have imagined in his wildest dreams. With John Zorn as executive producer, the disc was released as part of the Composer Series on the Tzadik Label. The notes describe the music as "confrontational, extreme and packed with drama and excitement". I couldn't say it any better.

September 2007 - Beautiful Feet Blog

If you're under 30 and you know it, Clap your Hands....Ok, here's some new music for the non-seniors in the bloggership: actually, MC Maguire can't be pigeonholed. 

He has done such eclectic work that his appeal may be very wide. 'Course, coming from Eastman (and more), he is bound to be well-rounded...

August 2007 - Wire Magazine / UK

...achieves the kind of maddening detail which can barely be grasped even after repeated listenings ...incredibly complex and elaborate musical structures...Maguire's obvious irreverence makes this academic difficulty of the work less forbidding.

August 2007 - Classical-Drone Blog

I see a strong parallel between Nancarrow pieces and a recent Tzadik release by MC Maguire, Meta-Conspiracy.. I listened to small excerpts, then bought the CD when it came out a few months ago. When I listen to the whole CD, Meta-Conspiracy is just as busy as Nancarrow pieces...A Short History of Lounge for piano and computer every bit the wild ride ....

July 2007 - Sonotone/24Hours / Switzerland

...It starts like the Apocalypse, with enormous waves of ear-splitting chaos. From the incredible entanglement of this maelstrom, an overwhelming enchantment emerges. grinds together rock, jazz, blues, a Bruckner symphony, minimalism, and hundreds of fragments borrowed from the chronology of all music. .As the Master of Ceremonies, in this staggering and excessive ritual of black incantation, the Canadian has a ridiculously long CV in all that is very classical: studying ,degrees, awards and offical commissions.....nothing to prepare the listener for this madcap music, kinetic and energetic like no other. Because of the strength of its' ideas, it destroys all the accepted ideas about Aesthetics, Beauty in Art, and other hubris using the same old terminology. Timid ears, stay away!

June 2007 - Squid's Ear/ Squidco / USA

...the Village Voice proclaimed him 'the most irritating and spellbinding composer since Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach'. The latter is an apt comparison, as Maguire tends to work in a melange of styles that blends and mashes compositional elements in coherent but bewildering ways...the results are enjoyable, if a bit mind-boggling...Genres are absorbed, chewed and regurgitated at an impressive rate; it would be difficult to characterize the work in any particular way, except to say that it embraces whatever it encounters, is sometimes frenetic, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, and often resolves to something beautiful... Maguire understands the need for dynamics, and gives the listener a chance to catch his breath before diving into another intriguing and engrossing section...Maguire's studio skills are impressive, and the recording benefits from a variety of aural tricks...A massive and amazing modern compositional work.

May 2007 - Arts Journal.com/Post-Classic / USA

...resplendently recorded...Compared to Maguire, Berg was a doodling improviser.... these are stunningly complex works, built along the lines of astonishingly intricate tempo and tonal systems that govern most of the details...ragments of pop song weave in and out, and rock-style guitar riffs, and computer-voice messages, and everything but samples of the kitchen sink...it's one of the most astonishing CDs I've ever heard, not intended for the faint-hearted, and if you listen often and closely, you'll hear tempo and collage effects you've never heard before.

May 2007 - Arts Journal.com

...Listening to MC Maguire's stuff is awesome, but it is so dense and complex that I'll have to pick up a CD to really get a better grasp of all that is going on...some of the more original music I've heard recently...

May 2007 - Arts Journal.com

...Finally it's here. Awesome. I'm completely ready to sit back, relax and have my ears blown away... again. I It is strange to hear so many contexts and sound worlds colliding and interchanging at such lightning speed. Definitely shouldn't drink too much coffee before consuming!

May 2007 - Arts Journal.com

...certainly is very original and engaging music. I think it does share some aspects of the Paul Dolden / John Oswald / Alex Trebek general Canuck aesthetic, but without a doubt, it is it's own living thing, with a more genuine electicism than Dolden, more complexity than Oswald, and more erudition than Trebek.

May 2007 - Arts Journal.com

...Internet criticism works! This announcement was the first thing I read in quite a while that made me rush out and get the disc - and I wasn't disappointed.

May 2007 - Arts Journal.com

The Maguire CD is amazing...

The recording is rich... it sculpts the contours of music... it is very sensual... funny... witty... There is a constant challenging dialog between music and the listener.

"Got that Crazy..." is terribly strong. It is impressive, monumental like a cranky black diamond ....always surprising and leaving us without respite. We are gasping, always forced to discover a new breach, crossing or outlet.... It 's constant elevation.

In the Short Story, we are smack in the middle of our own dramatic fight for life... perturbed, shaken, put in a whirl of violence and joy...totally reeled and dazed. But suddenly, a wit stings and we are surprised to smile, sharing the Maguire irony... Then, strangely, we find that Short Story is intimate and even tender because of the secrets that it reveals...

March 2007 - Arts Journal.com / postclassic

...Roll Over, Claude Vivier... His work for hire is rather amazingly sophisticated, and you can hear his imaginative commercials for Nike, Smirnoff, Fruit Loops (on his website), ... I first became aware of him via a torrential sound continuum called 'Seven Years 'on the 1989 Bang on a Can marathon, and and I've been trying to figure him out ever since. Because his music - wild, noisy, intense, relentlessly high-energy - is nearly opposite in style to most of the music I like, but it is nothing at all like most modernist music characterized by those qualities, and I always have to admire fanaticism.

Most of his pieces are what he calls "concertos," by which he means pieces for solo instrument accompanied/obliterated by tape or electronic soundfile layered with from 200 to 400 tracks. The noise periodically parts for pop references and quotations: lightly-altered pop songs, the scherzo from Bruckner's Eighth, Brazilian pop, heavy metal, all cascading by like someone trying to find his favorite radio station during a hurricane. .he had to alter some of the quotations to avoid copyright infringement. He claims that he replaced the vocal parts with vocalists singing software manuals in Portugese, but Mike's humor is so dry that it's hard to discern where reality ends and satire begins - probably somewhere within his music.

It turns out, though, that beneath all the wildness runs a detailed sense of proportion and structure as obsessive as that of the Berg Chamber Concerto or the middle studies of Nancarrow. Got That Crazy Latin/Metal Feelin' is based on 49 tonalities that alternately rise and descend by thirds.., the piece ascends to chord 7, returns to 1, slogs its way up to 14, returns to 1, and so on until it finally climbs the mountain of 49. The central tonality is the E power chord of the guitar solo, and you can sometimes hear the music dramatically return to it via a circle of fourths - though Maguire's moments of repose and respite start about where Mahler's climaxes end. Short History of Lounge, its title notwithstanding, is - at least on paper - a conventional three-movement concerto form, though enlivened by background quotations and sections that greatly accelerate and decelerate. The finale runs through an incredible gradual deceleration from quarter note = 900 to quarter note = 4. The magnitude of such gestures leaves you exhausted.

In retrospect, though, I should have figured that his sense of form was knitted together by obsessively detailed structure, because it would be extremely difficult to make music of such rich complexity without a plan to generate all the various moments: the musical analogue of Bruno's Theater of memory. .I can see why Zorn likes the music - perhaps a rare point at which our tastes overlap. Maguire's not completely isolated in Canadian music, for his friend Paul Dolden also makes take pieces of mammothly superimposed hundreds of tracks, and has gained a little more attention for doing so. But with his peculiar blend of postmodern style juxtapositions, pop appropriations, and fanatical intellectual structure, I think Maguire's the most original Canadian composer since R. Murray Schafer - and I don't know Schafer's music well enough to be certain the qualifier is necessary.

March 2007 - Arts Journal.com

heh. quarter note = 900. my middle school students will love this, since they're always cranking up the tempo to 300+..

March 2007 - Arts Journal.com

zowie! that "Alert! Alert!" sequence at about -1:45 to go had me apple-tabbing frantically to find which program was going nuts...

March 2007 - Arts Journal.com

I don't know--Schafer's pretty crazy (in a good way). But this stuff is great. I can't wait for the CD.

March 2007 - nonpopmusic.com

Wow! I'm absolutely loving MC Maguire. Such an imagination. Something new around every corner. What a creative genius.

Sammara's "Can't Move"

July 2007 - Download.com

The music itself is beautiful and entrancing, her voice is playfully haunting, and some of the lyrics, well...I gotta say I laughed my head off. In a GOOD way. "Nothing's Changed" and "Doormat" had me listening to certain parts again just to make sure I heard them right. Great stuff, here!

March 2006 - iacmusic.com

great track and influences, amazing vocals, loved the strength in the voice.. can't wait to hear more tracks

Feb 2006 - iacmusic.com

I like the lyrics on this twisted, yet st8-forward song. kaic feb 2006

Dec 2005 - Songramp.com

Interesting blend of vocal and instrumentation. I think the whole effect works very well.

Dec 2005 - Songramp.com

Reallyverygood track, rich in pathos and warmth, fine effects, great voice...

Dec 2005 - Download.com

Incredible! - really lovely vocal style on these tracks with fresh clean and bright - I guess it won't be long before we hear these guys in a stadium near you...

Nov 2005 - Audiostreet.com

A fascinating combination of electronic instruments & female voices.

Nov 2005 - Audiostreet.com

An eclectic experimental mix but with great melodies. Too often when people use electronics or be experimental, the melody suffers but not here. I'm looking forward to hearing more music from Sammara...

April 2005 - Audiostreet.com

These songs have a cool, lost, airy feel to them. I love the way you can just roll around and get lost and feel loved at the same time.

May 2004 - Beluga Records

It's good work for sure - the vocals are very high quality, the production is interesting and the songs are good.

May 2004 - Download.com

An exquisite spiritual approach and vision seem to underpin this entire record. South Asian singer-song writer Sammara is the cup of tea for any Bjork fan. The sounds of ritualistic soundscapes and tribal percussion will take you away to a misty, dreamy place.

To listen to a song from this just click on the title or the icon to the right.

To download a song from this list -

• WINDOWS - Right click on the title or the icon to the right, and select "Save Target As" from the menu.
• MAC - Right click on the title or the icon to the right, and select "download linked file" from the menu.

To listen to a song from this just click on the title or the icon to the right.

To download a song from this list -

• WINDOWS - Right click on the title or the icon to the right, and select "Save Target As" from the menu.
• MAC - Right click on the title or the icon to the right, and select "download linked file" from the menu.

10:44 - Haute couture Yogi-Mullah-Pope grants plenary, purgatorial indulgences to States of Punjab, Palestine and Pacifica.

8:58 - Vince Foster (with Hillary Clinton's love tomes, Col. Sanders, 3 Elvis impersonators and one so-so Saddam double) is alive and living the life of Riley underneath the pyramids in the galley of a black helicopter.

11:29 - Zimbabwe Black ops eat crow trying to cross-reference the Mayan Calendar, Egyptian Mythology, the Bohemian Grove and the number of internet hits on hot, wet Asian babes.

June 2001 - Nephilius(Norway) (CDREVIEW)
fortunecity.com/tinpan/bongos/560/

This is really something quite unique, samplers and tape loops with special sounds delivered through 7 long tracks. Some of the tracks are building themselves up to a real climax with an almost insane intensity. It's hard to put a label tag to this music but I guess you could call it speed-ambience combined with some trance psychedelia.

Vancouver's M.C. Maguire deftly blends a slew of varying genres into somewhat cohesive musical formats - - very dense collages. Yet, the chaos begins to make sense on repeat listens and is rooted in rhythm.

Don't file this under easy listening. But if you can afford the time (74 minutes) and the neighbours can stand the volume it demands, M.C. Maguire's mix-master approach sometimes resembles the '80's electronica of Holger Czukay and Jah Wobble, especially since he is just as likely to borrow from African and Asian sources as from the usual rock'n'roll well. There's definitely something Zappa in there, somewhere, and also a touch of Negitivland in the sheer density of the sampling and his propensity to chop it up in abrupt ways.

But Maguire's sense of form, which has him returning to hypnotically building beats and almost ethereal vocal choruses(even if there not made from 'real' vocals) finally stamps the project with an original, sometimes even transcendent vision. The disc is divided into seven long cuts, each bearing a faux-tableau title, such as "Russian Mob Extorts Asian Triad to Muscle Columbian Cartel to lean on Aliens to put Y2K jelly on my butt(sans anal-probe).org". It's not clear whether Maguire's verbiage... is part of some grand joke, but the music itself is quite serious, without any hints at pompousness.